158w ago - Today Scott Rhodes of Sony Worldwide Operations was asked in an interview with GamaSutra.com how they are combating piracy on the PS Vita platform, who responded that proprietary PlayStation Vita Game Cards are currently being used.

Below is an excerpt from the interview with the details, to quote: "Sony's been very, very open about the fact that piracy really hurt the PSP, so I was wondering if you could dive into a little bit about the efforts you've put into preventing that this time.

SR: That was front and center in the early specs of this machine. We needed to have something that would combat piracy from day one, and that's why the cards that you can purchase for the games are in their own proprietary format.

And these days, so many people say the word "proprietary" is a bad word, but it's something that we felt was completely necessary to make sure that people could not pirate these games. I mean, it's a custom security solution on each one of these cartridges. That is something that we are confident will protect us from piracy for the long term."

i agree with transient. the cost of these ps cards is a real put off to me for buying a vita. i dl an awful lot from psn on my ps3 and if it where forced onto cards id need 300gb worth of cards.. get real sony.

I don't mind the cartridges myself, but I do mind the small and expensive memory cards. I was planning to go purely digital downloads for my Vita, but with the cost of the memory cards it's going to be too expensive of a solution. I guess I can transfer the games to PC or PS3, but then you have to be at home and wait while it copies over.

I'd much rather a cheap 128GB card that I can fill up. As usual though, Sony puts up roadblocks for customers who want to stay legitimate. What'll end up happening is the Vita will be cracked and the pirated solutions will be more convenient than Sony's own offerings. Watch and see.

so.. what, are we going to have custom carts from like SuperCard from the DS scene now? Or will it go pure cfw.. They arent really stopping anything... just introducing a new security check or two. The downloadable titles are probably a little weaker in the security front, probably the same or similar deal as the ps3's security.

I cant remember the exact time but I think the PSP was out for about 2 months before UMDs were dumped. I got mine in October of the launch year (I think that was about 1-2 months after it was launched? and I could make backups just about straight away.

I had to upgrade to play GTA:LCS then downgrade for homebrew and ISOs. I know I had mine for about 1 month before I could rip and play backups. The first backup wasn't an ISO but that didn't come long after.